


A beastly tongue.

by spqr



Series: ladies!! [5]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: & boats, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Canon-Typical Violence, Cunnilingus, Dark Will Graham, F/M, Female Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Nightmares, Porn with Feelings, Sex & Violence, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:08:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25271413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: “I want you to know that you’re not getting out of here until I feel like we’re even,” she tells him.Hannibal’s too polite and too tactful to repeat the subtext out loud: that he is getting out of here, and that she’s the one who’s going to spring him.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Series: ladies!! [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1733536
Comments: 19
Kudos: 384





	A beastly tongue.

The only thing Will inherited from her father, apart from an extremely high tolerance for extremely shitty whiskey and a couple of busted fishing rods that she’s never gotten around to throwing out like they deserve, is the unshakeable belief that all love necessarily comes with pain. From her father that pain came in the form of fists and the festering neglect of a silent, empty house; from Hannibal it comes in the form of a smiling scar across her abdomen and a constant razor’s-edge feeling like one wrong move could send her tumbling over into darkness.

Even after she takes them over the cliff, she still feels the same, like some huge unconquerable wave is poised to slam into her if she lets her guard down for too long. The wave is the same breed as the mini-meltdowns she’s spent the past three years having in the privacy of her own bathroom, but Will guesses she’s fought down one too many mental breaks, and now they’re all piling up. The weight’s getting heavier. Someday soon she’s going to get a moment to herself, standing on the deck of their 40-foot sailboat, and this excruciating threshold that Hannibal’s been trying to force her over since the moment they met is going to give way, and he’s going to win. He’s going to succeed in ripping her out of the carefully-constructed moral pig pen that she built for herself when she was a kid, the one that allows her to exist in polite society—and then all bets will be off. He’ll have to answer for all the pain he’s caused. And Will might go ahead and take it out of him in blood.

***

Way back when, in the beginning, Will has a sex dream and wakes up naked in the middle of the woods.

It’s below freezing. Will’s tits are so cold they’re probably about to fall off, she can see her breath hanging in a cloud in front of her face, and the snow is up to her knees. The breeze that rustles through her hair is so light it’s like someone’s breathing on her, but it’s shot through with wet ice particles that bite her skin like barbs, and Will looks down at her fingers and the tips are dark blue, nearly black. She swears every way she knows how—loud, to keep herself warm—and spins around, and luckily she can see the faint outline of her house in the distance, so she shoves her frozen fingers under her arms and takes off running.

Collapsed in the shower with the spray running as hot as it will go, shivering and swearing and crying her way through the painful process of getting blood back into her hypothermic extremities, Will reaches for her flip phone and dials Hannibal. She’s not thinking; in her mind all there is are antlers and pitch black skin and something hard and hot and insistent buried so deep inside her she thought, while she was dreaming, that she would never feel empty or hungry again. And all her conscious psyche can do with that information is demand Hannibal.

 _“Will?”_ he answers, on the last ring. He sounds like he just woke up, and if Will were fully aware she might feel guilty for waking him, but right now all she feels is pain and water and a stab of desperation at the image of her psychiatrist in bed. Probably she should hang up. Probably it’s not very healthy to ask him to come over here.

 _“Will?”_ Hannibal repeats, with a sound like he’s sitting up. _“Are you alright? What happened?”_

Will realizes that she’s naked, and she’s sitting in the shower holding something that might electrocute her. Suddenly she feels dumb and nauseous. “I shouldn’t have called you. Shit, I’m sorry, I’ll hang up now.”

 _“You will do no such thing,”_ Hannibal orders. _“Tell me what’s wrong, Will. I’m worried about you.”_

Will knocks her head against the tile, which isn’t real tile at all but some kind of linoleum that’s so flimsy the whole vestibule shakes when she puts her weight against it. She’s only known the man for a month, but she wants things from him she’s never wanted from anyone else—comfort, warmth, stability, sex. The contents of her dream come back to her in a slap; Hannibal, peeled piece by piece out of his bespoke windowpane suit, the antlers growing from his head and something like blood in the moonlight running down from the crown of his head, staining his entire body, the drips from his fingers like talons. He’d been in her bed, inside her and on top of her and all around her, and she’d let her legs fall open for him like she’d only ever done for herself, before, and he’d taken her, and she’d felt safe and loved and completely exposed.

“I’m fine,” she says into the phone. “Sorry I woke you.”

She hangs up. The phone starts ringing again immediately, the buzz of it on the linoleum jarring in the close space of her bathroom. The caller ID on the tiny diode screen says _HANNIBAL LECTER_.

Will doesn’t answer. She’s aware enough now that she can hear her dogs nuzzling at the other side of the door, whining and pawing around, and her fingers are bright red instead of blue, so she turns the shower off and wraps herself in two towels and goes out to ransack her cheap portable closet for warm clothes. She ends up in four pairs of socks, two pairs of sweat pants, and two FBI sweatshirts, with three extra blankets on the bed and Winston snuggled up under as her own personal heater, and she knows she’s probably going to wake up with an internal temperature of 200°F, but at least she’s warm. She presses her back to Winston’s back and turns her face forcibly into her pillow and resolves to never sleep naked again, even though she’s pretty damn sure she went to bed fully-clothed.

***

“Tell me what you dreamt about,” Hannibal insists, two days later. “It must have been very distressing, for you to feel the need to phone your psychiatrist in the middle of the night.”

Will glowers. “I wasn’t calling you because you’re my _psychiatrist_ ,” she says, before she can think about it.

Hannibal hides his delight well, but not well enough to keep it from her. She rolls her eyes heavenward and slumps down in her chair, bracing for impact, which, of fucking course, comes in the form of question.

“If you were not looking for psychiatric guidance, then why did you contact me, and not a friend? Alana, perhaps?”

Will hates it when he’s purposefully dense. “Alana and I are colleagues. Friendly colleagues, maybe, but nothing more than that. And I called you because…” She can’t come up with a good lie. “The dream was about you. I guess I wanted to hear your voice.”

Hannibal tilts his head. “Since I was party to it, may I inquire as to the dream’s contents?”

Will glares daggers. “You may not.”

The corners of his lips flicker in a smile, there and gone. “Am I to infer it was of a lurid nature?”

“I really don’t think this falls under your purview, doctor.” Will knows she’s grasping at straws, but she’s got nothing else to hold on to. “What I dream about at night hardly affects my ability to perform in the field.”

“Will. You need not feel embarrassed to share anything with me. I assure you, you would not be the first person to develop an attachment to her mental health provider. Our relationship is, by its very nature, quite intimate.”

The way he says that, _quite intimate,_ dropping his voice into something low and almost purring while he looks at her with that amused-but-trying-not-to-be crinkle at the corner of his eyes, makes her want to snap at him that she dreamed he had claws and that he sunk them into her back and through her ribcage and out her chest so that he could hold her steady while she died and feel her heart stop against his fingertips and fuck her through it, just to see him falter. It’s her default, whenever she wants someone to go away, look away, stop paying attention to her, leave sooner rather than later, to say something dark and violent and unforgiveable. But she thinks the scarier prospect, here, is that if she says it, he might not care. He might just absorb the raw, angry force of her.

“I dreamed about you, in my bed,” she admits, instead of all that other stuff. “I’ve never had a sex dream before.”

Hannibal’s eyes darken. His tongue comes out, briefly, to wet his lower lip, and Will feels a rush of heat for the first time in her life at the idea that a man might be attracted to her. Not that she looks all that attractive right now, in her jeans and her cable-knit sweater with her hair tied in a messy knot on top of her head that she’s going to have to fight to get loose in the shower tonight, boots caked with dried mud, glasses crooked on her face because Buster got a hold of them this morning and it took her a good ten minutes to catch him. But it’s true, what she told him; she’s had sex, obviously, gone through the motions and gotten it over with just to see what all the hype was about, but she’s never had an orgasm with a partner and she’s never woken up with an ache between her legs like she did last night, even though she was freezing her ass off in the middle of the woods. She’s never _wanted_ someone, not really. Not like she wants Hannibal.

The man in question uncrosses his legs, and for a moment with both feet flat on the floor it looks like he might get up out of his chair, cross the room in two great strides, and take her.

But instead, he makes a note in his Moleskin, flips the page, and asks about murder.

***

Will’s the sort of person who subsists on a rotating schedule of ramen, PB&J, and the single-serve frozen dinners that are super embarrassing to get caught buying at the grocery store, so she’s not surprised in the slightest when it’s Alana Bloom Hannibal falls into bed with, instead of her. And she’s not surprised that it’s Bedelia DuMaurier he runs away to Europe with; she’s not surprised that she’s the one laying on his kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood watching a girl who feels like her responsibility bleed out through a slashed throat for the second time in her life. She is _hurt_ , though—and acutely, constantly aware of how stupid it is that she can still be hurt by someone who’s done nothing but manipulate and betray her since the moment they met.

But she called him to warn him. She understands him, and she forgave him, and she called him to warn him, and he still cut her open with a linoleum knife and left her to die.

Will feels like a child who’s been chastised. Like she just got her father’s belt— _Damn it, Wilma! Quit leavin’ the icebox open, you’re lettin’ the cold out!—_ and Abigail goes still and lifeless under her hands and Will uses the last of her strength to roll over onto her back, hot blood slicking out of her at an alarming rate, an oil spill on Hannibal’s kitchen floor, still, somehow, wrongly, disgustingly, able to feel the burning ardor of Hannibal’s love under all this fucking _pain_. And maybe that’s why she’s here, and Alana was in his bed and Bedelia is in his bed: Will’s the only one who knows him well enough to hurt him.

***

She marries Mark while Hannibal’s in prison. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have a kid, and it’s a good thing she manages to divert that one pregnancy scare without him knowing, because she’s not sure she’d have the stomach to do this to a kid, but she needs Mark. She needs to hide in Mark, so she has time to rebuild her pig pen. She had to tear it down to find Hannibal, and now if she wants to re-enter normal society she has to figure out how to put it back up.

Mark plays minor league baseball and calls her _Willie_ and she fakes all her orgasms but it’s chump change, in the grand scheme of things, to have to slip out of bed while he’s asleep and rub one out in the bathroom thinking of a serial killer. He doesn’t ask her if she knows what it would feel like to sink her teeth into a beating heart, and he only tries to talk to her about her time in prison once, sweat cooling on their skin after a round of vigorous—on his part—and frustrated—on her part—sex, bare bodies tangled in a mess of sheets. Will does her best to push down the throbbing ache of emptiness between her legs and tells him she spent most of it in solitary, which is technically true but not really fully honest, since “solitary” didn’t mean she wasn’t subject to Matthew Brown standing outside her cell jerking off and trying to goad her into reliving her crimes, didn’t mean Frederick Chilton didn’t try to leverage the everpresent threat of gang rape by the orderlies and the other prisoners to coerce her into spilling her guts. Books about rare female serial killers are always best sellers.

When she goes back to BSHCI in the midst of the Red Dragon investigation, she stands outside her old cell and tells Hannibal, “I hope you appreciate the fucking karma at work here.”

Hannibal’s eyes are trained on her wedding ring, and he says, with casualness so false it’s almost comical, “I see congratulations are in order. When were your nuptials?”

Will doesn’t dignify that with a response. “I’d like your help with a case. If you can spare the time.”

Hannibal holds his hands out demonstratively at his cell. “I’m afraid I have nothing but time, my dear Will.”

She flinches at the endearment, but if he notices he’s kind enough not to say anything. Or delighted enough by her reaction not to say anything. Either way, Will takes a tight breath through her nose, seeking control. “Since you’re tapped into the serial killer grapevine, I guess you’ve heard about the Tooth Fairy killings.”

“Indeed I have,” Hannibal allows, before swiftly switching tack. “Tell me, Will. What is your true reason for coming to see me? We both know you could handle this case in your sleep, if you so chose.”

“I’m rusty,” Will bites. She’s raw, touchy. She forgot what this felt like. “The Dragon—”

Hannibal _tsks_. “I know it’s been quite some time since we spoke, but you cannot think I will be so easily diverted. You came here for something only I can give you, and it is nothing to do with this shy boy.”

Will tries to make herself think of Mark, but it’s impossible. There’s no pretending, here, not when she’s finally back to standing in front of the only other person on the entire fucking planet who’s _awake_. She should be scared, after everything Hannibal put her through, considering what he very nearly succeeded in molding her into, but all she feels is an undeniable _rightness_ , that this is the only possible place it makes sense for her to be, and the only possible thing it makes sense for her to be doing. There’s never been any pain, with Mark, and maybe it makes her sick but she thinks she needs it.

“I want you to know that you’re not getting out of here until I feel like we’re even,” she tells him.

Hannibal’s too polite and too tactful to repeat the subtext out loud: that he is getting out of here, and that she’s the one who’s going to spring him. They’re well past the point of being purposefully dense.

***

Halfway across the Atlantic, Will dreams that Hannibal is eating her. His mouth is bright red with her blood, and he swallows chunks of her, his fingers sink in the bloody divots left behind and she leans up and puts her lips to his shoulder and takes a bite of him, too. Swallows without chewing, feels him slide past her esophagus and into her stomach, the nauseous metallic tang of his flesh a permanent part of her, and they keep tearing at each other with teeth and nails and moans and desperate hungry sounds like animals fucking in heat until they’ve consumed each other entirely and there’s nothing left of either of them, no one can have him but her just like no one has ever had her but him.

She wakes silently in the stuffy womb of the belowdeck cabin. Hannibal is asleep in bed next to her, his back to her. Waves lap at the hull outside. The boat rocks gently under them—more gently than it has since they left port. She stares at the low ceiling, lit slightly green by the running lights abovedeck, and thinks about waking Hannibal to ask him why he never tried to fight it. Why he didn’t feel the compulsion, like she did for so many years, to fit herself into a box, push down the urges. Why he never made any attempt to adopt his person suit as his actual person; why he was happy being a monster.

She doesn’t wake him. She’s pretty sure she knows the answer: Hannibal, for all his manipulations, all his perfect disguises, has never been one to deny himself anything. Will is quite the opposite.

It’s how she knows Bedelia was lying, when she told Will Hannibal was in love with her. If Hannibal had wanted Will he’d have had her back in his office, all those years ago, when she’d admitted to having carnal dreams about him. She would have let him, and she doesn’t doubt he knew that. She’d have him just as eagerly now—more eagerly, even, with everything between them, even as paradoxical as that seems—and she doesn’t doubt he knows that, either.

Subterfuge seems so pointless in their current situation that it’s almost funny. They’re surrounded on all sides by endless ocean, sharing the same bed and the same 40 feet of living space, they slayed a dragon together. Yes, they’ve tried to kill each other; yes, he hid her own life-threatening brain infection from her because he wanted to _see what would fucking happen_ , but that’s in the past and there’s no lying about it, now. There’s no lying about anything, now.

So in the pale light of morning, curled around hot coffees in the tiny galley, she says, “Bedelia told me you’re in love with me.”

Hannibal only hums in response.

There’s something about him like this, in a long-sleeve t-shirt and navy chinos that aren’t quite the right size seeing as they stole them, hair hanging in his eyes and two days of scruff on his face, that makes Will feel like they’ve already slept together. She’s willing to bet that no one else alive has ever seen him like this. She knows Alana’s seen him naked and Bedelia’s seen him after eleven hours of air travel, cavorting through Italy under an assumed name, but no one else has seen the fearsome Chesapeake Ripper stripped of all his finery and otherness, reduced to metal field mugs and a hot plate and bare feet in worn leather Sperrys. This Hannibal is only for her; just like this Will, easy with death and easy with killing and easy, for the first time in as long as she can remember, with her own self, is only for him.

But this morning, standing shirtless and toweling off in the open door to the head while she coaxed herself out of bed, he asked what she’d dreamt about, and she’d told him the truth, so she feel like she deserves an answer.

“That’s not true, though, right? You’re just…” _Obsessed_ doesn’t quite seem like the right word, because she wouldn’t want it used against her, but she can’t quite think of a better one. _Devoted_ , maybe. _Pious._ Bedelia had said, when Will insisted that love didn’t usually come with gaping abdominal wounds, that adoration, for Hannibal, was not the same as it was for everyone else. It was more controlling, more violent. It had teeth.

“I’m just what, Will?” Hannibal asks, when she’s been quiet too long.

Will looks away from him, out the porthole window at the azure expanse of sea, then back at him after a second when she gets angry with herself for chickening out. “I’m not the type of person you’re attracted to,” she manages to say, at last. “I wore black to my wedding because I couldn’t see the point in shelling out for a dress I was only going to use once, and all I had was the one I wear to funerals. You like…I don’t know. Sophistication. Women who wear heels, and stockings.”

Hannibal’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before. Like he’s reorganizing entire floorplans in his mind.

 _Love, for Hannibal_ , Bedelia had told Will, _means leaving you alive_.

When Will had woken up, after the fall, Coast Guard helicopters circling overhead like vultures and her whole body bruised from impact, Hannibal had been sitting over her with needle and thread, even though he was still bleeding freely from his own gunshot wound. He’d turned himself in, on her porch in Wolf Trap, when he had plenty of time to kill her and escape. He’d taken Abigail from her, incandescent with cold, dead fury, and cradled her head against his shoulder while he cut her open just right—perfectly right—to make sure her heart was still beating when the paramedics finally arrived. If she were anyone but Will Graham she’d be dead a dozen times over.

“My dear.” Hannibal’s voice is thick with some unidentifiable emotion. “I have never been one to admire a book for its cover. Even in one of those atrocious prison jumpsuits, you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

***

In the hottest depths of her insanity, before she woke up in BSHCI and realized what he’d done to her, Hannibal was the only one on earth she trusted to steer her. Hindsight tells her that was deliberate maneuvering on his part, but in the heat of battle all she knew was that Jack wanted her put together with duct tape just long enough to solve the Ripper case and Alana wanted her in a crying puddle on the floor admitting that she never should have gone back into the field in the first place and the strange antlered creature in her dreams wanted her to tear someone’s intestines out with her bare hands and rub their blood up around her ankles over the knob of her knees and the insides of her thighs between her legs. Hannibal was calm. He was steady. He was the only existing port in a storm which, for Will, had consumed the entire world.

She’d been more angry with him for the betrayal of that trust than she ever had been for the murders, and maybe that should’ve been more of an early warning sign that she was always going to end up here. The killings were inconsequential. She’d crossed the line with Randall Tier with almost no hesitation and would’ve killed Freddie Lounds too, if Jack hadn’t been watching her every move. The pig pen had, at that point, been utterly decimated, and she knows now that if she’d gone with Hannibal then, like she’d intended to that horrible night, there would’ve been nothing left of the fences. By gutting her he had, inadvertently, given her time and space to build her walls back up, undone all his good work, but Will knows she’d never have mourned the loss of her morality, if he hadn’t. She’d never have mourned the rest of the world, if she had him.

***

Will’s attraction to the male form has always been largely theoretical.

At the NOPD she’d had sex a couple times with other cops, mostly because people were starting to make jokes about her being a nun and a born-again Christian and it was starting to call more attention to her behavior than she was comfortable with. The men were a smokescreen, and beyond that they weren’t much to write home about, if Will had even had a home to write to; she sucked bruises into their throats and made some noises she’d heard in porn and tried not to seem like this was the first and second time she’d ever had sex, respectively. She wasn’t changed by it, after. She didn’t feel any different for having had a penis inside her. But people at work stopped looking at her sideways, so mission accomplished.

When she had time to stop and think about it, she’d always thought she was fucked up sexually, on top of all the other ways she was fucked up. The only times she’d ever felt aroused in the wild were when her jeans were too tight or she was at a crime scene, staring at a dead body, at fresh bloodspatter slicked over the walls in a seedy motel, her breath quickening in her chest and throbbing pressure building between her legs, and luckily the other guys on the force had always just taken her flush for the nausea that other detectives felt at the scene; when she excused herself, they assumed she was too delicate to handle it, that she needed to go vomit in a dumpster, not that she needed to go curl up against a wall and breathe heavy until she felt more like a normal person and less like a monster.

She’s never really seen a man and wanted to get him naked, wanted to touch him, wanted him to touch her. Not even Mark, for all that she liked him, trusted him. Hannibal, though. She looks at Hannibal and she wants to put her mouth all over him. She wants to lick him, leave her spit drying on his skin. She wants to sink her tongue in his mouth and taste the hot, wet inside of him, run the tip over the sharp ridges of his teeth and feel out his hard palate and the soft red give of his cheek. She wants his penis shoved so deep in her she can feel it behind her sternum; she wants to see the messy slick of her fluids smeared across his pelvis and his thighs and his fingers, up to his wrists; she wants him to bury his fingers in her ass and bite her and hold her by the neck, so she feels small and limp and breakable in his arms.

***

“Once,” Hannibal says, “you told me you had never dreamt of sex, before you met me. Was that the truth?”

They haven’t even kissed yet. She rolls her forehead back and forth over his, feeling like she’s dying, her legs hooked around the back of his chair and his arms surrounding her, the hard bulge in the front of his chinos pressed between her legs as she shifts ever-so-slightly in his lap, looking for friction, for relief. The boat rocks over a sharp wave, knocking them hard together, and she swears. “Yeah,” she manages, breathless. “Yeah, that was the truth.”

His thumb brushes over her cheek. He sinks his fingers in her hair, cradling her skull. “I assume you are not a virgin.”

Will laughs. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Hannibal hums, and doesn’t deny it.

Will knows it’s not possessiveness, not really. Hannibal loves things that he makes, his tableaus and his feasts and his music for harpsichord; to _make_ her in a carnal sense would bring him the same satisfaction as making her a killer.

She can’t give him her virginity, that ship has sailed, but she can give him something else. “They never made me come,” she tells him. “No one has ever made me come except me.”

Hannibal breathes hard. “Then I will have the honor of being the first.”

“It’s not a question of skill,” Will says, because he has that look on his face he used to get when they were sparring in his office and he’d just thought of something particularly vexing to say. “They just…none of them were right.”

None of them were you, she doesn’t say—none of them were prolific serial murderers who could look at the bare violent truth of my soul without flinching. But she thinks he hears it anyways.

“Dear Will,” he murmurs, reverent, and kisses her like he’s taking communion.

Will has never particularly understood the hype around kissing, just like she’s never understood the hype around sex, but at the first touch of his lips it all makes perfect sense. Possibly because of where his mouth has been, because of what it’s done, but mostly because it’s Hannibal. Hannibal who’s manhandling her, pressing her mouth open with his thumb to lick inside as far as he can, Hannibal who surges up out of his chair, bringing her with him, so she has to put a hand over her head to stop from crashing into the low ceiling, legs wrapped around the solid heft of his torso. He has to put her down in the hallway, the space is too cramped, but then they’re through the low door to their berth and she falls back onto the bed that smells like both of them and he follows her down, laying the full heavy weight of his body between her spread legs.

“I love you,” she tells him while he wrassles with the sweater she’s wearing, and sounds as mad about it as she still feels, some days, helpless to feel any other way and furious at her helplessness. “Hannibal, fuck, I love you.”

He succeeds in getting her sweater over her head, and looks away from the ruddy peaks of her nipples under the white A-frame she’s left in to meet her eyes. “What does love mean, for you?”

Of fucking course he can’t just tell her he loves her back. Once a psychiatrist, always a psychiatrist. But Will supposes she knew what she was getting, and she also supposes she wouldn’t have him any other way. She wants to answer him, but she finds, staring up at him, that she’s never really thought about it before—what love means for her—and suddenly trying to put it into words feels like staring at the sun, like trying to talk about her father’s death, like touching a wound that’s still raw. She reaches for him, and he goes to her, blanketing her with the warmth of his body. “It means you could kill me, and I’d forgive you.”

Will dealt with hundreds of battered women in her time at the NOPD; she responded to enough domestic disturbances, arrested enough husbands for rape and murder. She knows that it’s not healthy to forgive a man for splitting her open with a linoleum knife and fucking with her head and sending her to prison and force-feeding her a girl’s ear, but the entire concept of _a healthy relationship_ requires participants who are normal and human and aren’t _monsters_ , and no matter how good she may have gotten at pretending, Will has never been that.

Hannibal’s expression softens. “I gave up dreams of killing you a long time ago,” he admits. “I could not bear what came after.”

Will knows what he means. It’s why she went over the cliff with him.

She pulls him back down to kiss him again, needing urgenlty to feel as much of him as she can, like years of wanting him and not touching him have just caught up with her in one big hungry push. Hannibal’s hands are under her A-frame, pressing over her tits, palms big and warm over her nipples, and it feels so good Will wants to swear about it, but his tongue is in her mouth so all she can do is moan. She slides her own hands up under his shirt, finding skin, finding the wide barrel of his sides and the wiry bristle of his chest hair, and she can feel the proof of his arousal pressed tight and hard against the inseam of her jeans, but when she goes to slide the shirt off he draws away, humming, and catches her hands. “Not yet,” he says, pressing her hands back toward the bulkhead, the pillows they share. “Let me take you apart, my dear. Please.”

And what can Will say to that, except: “You already have.”

***

The closest thing to an admission of guilt she ever received, while she was incarcerated at BSHCI, was Hannibal sitting across from her cage in the visitor’s area, saying, “I did not think they would remand you to a men’s prison.”

Chilton had kept Will up for the entirety of the previous night with an “experimental therapeutic tactic” that essentially amounted to psychological torture, flashing the lights in her cell and blaring sirens every time she managed to drift off. They’d taken her pillow around dawn; Matthew Brown had offered to give it back if she sucked his cock, if she let him come down her throat, and Will hadn’t even been able to muster the energy to tell him _No,_ had only been able to glare exhaustedly from where she was trapped in a straight jacket in the corner. She’d thought about saying _Yes_ just so he would take off her muzzle. And now, in this cage, with Hannibal watching her with a pitying expression on his face that is so _blatantly_ falsified that she wants to scream, Will felt wrung out, beaten, reduced to animal hungers—for sleep, for safety, for warmth, for touch.

“There are no women’s prisons that could take me,” she said, voice raspy with disuse. “There are no other women like me.”

His eyes had sparkled with something. Delight, maybe. Relish. “Indeed,” he assented, inclining his head. “But neither would I consider the inmates here your fellows. You are an utterly singular individual.”

Years later, the first night at sea, only a few tender hours after Will had felt strong enough to get out of bed and get them underway, he took her left hand in his, slid her wedding ring off her finger, and cast it into the waves. Will understands, suddenly, that he hadn’t meant she was alone, but that _they_ were alone. There was no one else on earth for either of them.

***

Hannibal’s thumb slips over the throbbing nub of her clit for less than a second before he’s moving on, running the digit down to ease open her folds, press into the drenched mouth of her cunt. He’s down between her legs, eyes level with her hips, and all that Will has left on is her A-frame while he’s still fully clothed. He’s even got his fucking shoes on, but he doesn’t seem to care; he can’t tear his eyes away from her, the wanton spread of her legs, the rabbiting heave of her ribcage, her tits under white fabric translucent with his own saliva, and every second that goes past with him _looking_ at her like that makes the pulse of her cunt get more and more painful, more and more desperate. “Hannibal,” she says, half-begging, and he sinks his thumb into her.

She so fucking wet, there’s no resistance. His other fingers brush the crease where her ass meets her thigh, and he’s barely doing anything, just sitting there with his thumb soaking in her vagina, but she feels like she’s on fire. She reaches down and grabs onto his forearm, looking for stability, feeling the ripcord strength of his muscles under sleeve, under skin. He murmurs her name, and pulls her hand away, and presses a kiss to her palm, and says, “Hold onto the pillows,” and Will’s hands snap up above her head to obey without any input from her conscious mind. Hannibal grins, seeing that, seeing everything, and he bends to press a kiss to her belly button, and then lower, slowly, like he’s savoring it, and Will hasn’t really had occasion to do much landscaping down there the last few weeks, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He noses over her wet curls, bypasses her clit again with a brief, perfunctory kiss that makes Will grunt in frustration, and settles in where his thumb is holding her open.

At the first touch of his tongue, wet and shocking, Will thumps one foot flat down on the mattress and arches up into his face so fast it’s a good thing he’s got his forearm across her hips, because otherwise she would’ve given him a bloody nose. He pulls back just enoug to peer up at her, inquisitive, still somehow managing to look prim with her fluids shiny on his chin, and asks, “Will. Has no one ever done this for you?”

Mark had offered, a couple times, but the thought of it had made her so uncomfortable that she’d lied and told him she didn’t like it. It was too much, for someone who preferred to have sex with the lights off, to expose herself to someone like that, even her husband. And now, here, spread open for Hannibal, she’s glad that no one’s ever eaten her out. This part of her is only for him. She reaches out and runs her fingers through his hair, and says, “No. Only you.”

He growls, thumb tightening where it’s still buried inside her, and then he _devours_ her. Will twists her hands in the pillows, legs coming up to hook over his shoulders, and mostly tries not to pass out from how good it feels, swearing and saying _Hannibal_ in a voice that’s sort of panicked as he pushes her closer and closer to the edge of a cliff she’s never gone over in someone else’s presence, his tongue laving at her, laving _into_ her, the muscle slick and textured and twisting against her tender internal walls, the knuckle of his pointer finger soothing over her perineum and his fingertips brushing tantalizingly close to her hole. He breaks away, briefly, to look up at her with her slick smeared all over his face and say, “Delicious,” to which she can do nothing but gasp, _Jesus, shut the fuck up_ and coax him back down with her heels against his shoulders. He slips his thumb out and replaces it with three thick fingers, stretching her so good her eyes roll back in her head, and then his mouth is hot and wet breathing humid over the place where she wants him, and then he’s there, tongue circling her clit, hooking at the underside and pressing flat against the tight bud of nerves, and Will is feverish with it, her whole body shivering, soaked with sweat, so fucking close, and she says, _“Hannibal_ ,” and he must hear what she really means, what she herself doesn’t even know to say, because she feels the barest hint of teeth scrape over her clit, and that’s it, she’s gone.

She comes with a ragged shout, hands flying off the pillows to grasp his head, and he licks her through it. His fingers piston in and out of her cunt so powerfully, so violently that he lifts her hips off the bed with every upstroke.

She might actually pass out for a second, because the next thing she’s aware of he’s lying alongside her, one of her legs hitched up over his hip, fingers still moving lazily inside her vagina as it pulses weakly in the aftershocks, mouthing at her hard nipple through her shirt. “Gorgeous,” he murmurs. “Dear Will. I should have taken you the moment I saw you.”

“I might not have been so amenable,” she replies, just as softly. “I was a very different person back then.”

“Not so very different.” His thumb brushes her tender clit, and she jolts, overstimulated. All she gets in return for her annoyed glare is a fond, self-satisfied grin. “You just needed someone to give you permission to stop hiding.”

She rolls him over onto his back, and he lets her. He lets her divest him of his shirt, and his chinos—wrestling them down the length of the bed, where she finds his shoes still on, and give him a look so tired and unamused that he smiles indulgently and, pausing to kiss her, the taste of her cunt still in on his lips, strips the rest of the way by himself. Will peels off her A-frame and tosses it on the floor, and then they’re back in bed, and she mouths her way down his chest, the solid center of him, stopping to roll his nipples between her teeth. He sucks in a sharp, quiet breath and holds her hair away from her face, eyes drinking in hungrily the sight of her lips pressed wet against his skin, her nose skimming over his sternum, her small fingers flickering across the raw pink skin, the dark sutures of his still-healing bullet wound.

His penis is flushed, hot and hard to the touch, and it stands on a bit of a starboard angle. Will wraps her hand around it and finds her fingers don’t touch, which makes her want to put it inside her and leave it there for days, just sit on it and rock her hips every once and a while to feel it twitch inside her, find her release again and again and keep him hard and huge and filling her up. She pumps it once, but it’s too dry, so she reaches down between her own legs and wets her fingers and does it again, and Hannibal makes an animal sound, pain and pleasure and adoration in one. “When I dream about this,” she tells him, because he’s always had a hard-on for her more disturbing dreams, “there’s always blood.” His erection bright red and slick with it, running down the insides of her thighs, their skin stained and their hair matted and his eyes burning dark through the crimson haze.

Hannibal’s fist tightens in her hair, then releases. “Perhaps later this month, we might try it your way.”

It takes Will a second to realize what he means, but when she does she feels breathless. She climbs over him on all fours, the emptiness inside her suddenly unbearable. His eyes stay locked on hers even though her naked tits are right there in his face, and she wonders when she stopped wanting to get even with him and started wanting to sit on his cock all day like a bitch in heat, and then realizes she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. He’s here, they’re together. And they left normal life behind a while ago.

Will braces herself with a hand on his chest, reaches down between them, and guides his erection inside her. He’s huge; he spears her open, and she has a brief, violent flashback to standing in his kitchen with his knife inside her, and nearly comes right then and there, before she’s even fully seated. Her thighs shake, her cunt hurts, stretched too far too fast, but she takes him all the way, watching the way his mouth falls open and his eyes flutter, insensate with pleasure. The crease where her ass meets her thighs comes to rest against his pelvis, and for a moment she just sits, breathing around the intrusion of his penis, desperate and quick on the inhale and shivering on the exhale, gradually dropping her weight more and more, until she’s relaxed and he’s as deep inside her as it’s physically possible to be. She moves, just a little bit. He makes a high noise in the back of his throat.

“The first time I had a sex dream about you,” she says, as she begins to move in earnest, her walls dragging at the rod of his erection with every upstroke, “I dreamt you killed me while you were fucking me, and then kept fucking me.”

Hannibal makes a sound like he’s the one dying. His hands come up on her hips, fingers gripping tight enough to bruise, and the little shock of pain makes Will lightheaded. “Will,” he gasps. “Oh, _Will—”_

She takes two of his fingers and guides them up inside her, past the stretched mouth of her vagina and into the wet heat of her cunt. He curves them, pressing hard against the taut wall of muscle, fucks them into her in time with his cock, and Will’s clit throbs for attention, but she can’t come yet. She pulls his hand out, thrilled at how he lets her handle him, and guides his fingers, wet with her slick, around behind her. He makes an understanding noise when he realizes what she wants, and a moment later she feels his first finger slide past the tight rim of her hole, the intrusion heady andpainful and too much and not enough all at once, and she wants all of him inside her, she wants to be as full of Hannibal as she can possibly be, so she leans down and sets her teeth to the side of his neck and _bites_ , her hips grinding up and back, up and back, onto his cock and his fingers and she feels the great huge muscle of his body underneath her tense like a shock and then he comes with a deep, animal moan.

Before his erection can go down, while he’s still pulsing come inside her, still out of his mind, he flips her over and fucks her roughly toward the precipice of her second orgasm of the morning, her own hand between her legs, fingers savage over her clit, stripping it raw, and Will has tears in her eyes and his blood in her mouth and he shoves two fingers in her ass and it hurts but it hurts better than anything she’s ever felt and she comes, helpless, split open by his cock, on the sixth thrust.

***

Eventually, Will regains enough feeling in her legs to get dressed and make her way up onto the deck to check their heading. They’re going strong, the wind good and true, carrying them towards Europe and their new lives. She checks the radar; there’s a weather system developing south of them that she’ll have to keep an eye on, nothing near as bad as the Cat 2 they passed through north of the Bahamas, but she still plots an alternate course for landfall in the Canary Islands in case things get dicey.

Hannibal steps up behind her, and puts his arms around her waist. It’s only been an hour since she had him inside her, and his blood in her stomach is making her vaguely nauseous, but she suddenly wants him to carry her back to bed, tuck her inside the cover of his chest and never let her up again.

“I want to apologize,” he says, against her shoulder, “for all the pain I caused you, in our old lives. The shock of waking up one day and realizing I was no longer alone, as I had been my whole life, was quite unbalancing.”

“Don’t apologize,” Will chides. Her eyes stay on the radar, but her attention is all on him, on the warmth of his body, the feeling of his heartbeat against her back, his arm under her tits. “I plan on making you pay. Tenfold.”

Hannibal hums, sweeps her hair aside, and presses a kiss to the back of her neck. “I look forward to it.”


End file.
